Children of Zhivago. The Last Russian Intelligentsia

«Children of Zhivago» –– a collective story of the people who shaped the culture, worldview, and public opinion in Russia after Stalin's death. These are not only the famous «Sixtiers» like Alexander Twardowski, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Vladimir Vysotsky, but also their older mentors from Ilya Ehrenburg to Dmitry Likhachev, dissidents Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, physicists and sociologists, journalists and filmmakers, directors and theater actors, state and party workers –– all those who saw themselves as heirs of the Russian intelligentsia. This book –– is about the powerful cultural environment that has disappeared along with the Soviet Union, but continues to inspire and move many of us. The unifying image of the book –– the fate of Yuri Zhivago from Boris Pasternak's novel, a brilliant extended epitaph on the destruction of the pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. The author of the book, Vladislav Zubok, is a graduate of Moscow State University, a professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the author of acclaimed books «Collapse: The Death of the Soviet Union» and «The Failed Empire», and his latest work «The Cold War World» became a finalist for the George Orwell Prize in 2025.